How does one verify Apostolic Succession?

[x1980x]

I have a basic understanding about what Apostolic Succession means in a dictionary sense. How does one actually verify that a person who claims to have Apostolic Succession actually does? That is, if I walk into the local Catholic parish and ask the parish priest if he has apostolic succession, and then when told yes, tell him “prove it!”, what can or would he do? E.g. how do I know that he doesn’t derive his “succession” through a 12th century English impostor who put on Bishop’s robes because he believed it was a ticket to a good life, was smart enough that he duped a town into accepting him as a valid Bishop, then ended up ordaining additional Bishops, who passed on an invalid succession all these centuries in good faith, never suspecting that they lacked actual Apostolic Succession because the impostor was never found out.

Is this something that one has to accept on faith, or can I literally ask a priest to show his ordination record back to the Apostles and expect to get a believable record?

E.g. “…And then, that predecessor was ordained Bishop by Carolus, Bishop of Paris in 1343, and the original paperwork is at the Cathedral of Paris. Ask for Pierre in Records. The document index number is T-334534. Carolus was ordained Bishop by Adolphus, Bishop of Vienna, in 1302, and the original paperwork is now at the Vatican due to records collation after the Cathedral ran out of space. The document index number is S-3342-TE-2311 and is in Document Annex G…” all the way back to one of the Apostles.

In no way is this question an attack on the CC’s Apostolic Succession.

This question is intended respectfully and is a rather important matter considering how many non-Catholics have perceived the CC structure as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy.

 

[FrancisB]

It doesn’t go all the way back to the Apostles, but the lineage charts at catholic-hierarchy.org/ do have quite an extensive list of details as to the succession of bishops.

Edit: Having looked through quite a bit, it seems (rather unsurprisingly) that the lineage of most, if not all, of the Catholic bishops traces back to a pope within a matter of a few generations, and so I suppose it is possible that all of the Apostolic Succession in the west traces back to Rome, although I don’t think this was necessarily always the case.

 

[Dirt]

from The Gospel of Saint Matthew; ch. 16

"[16] Simon Peter answered and said: Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God. [17] And Jesus answering, said to him: Blessed art thou, Simon Bar-Jona: because flesh and blood hath not revealed it to thee, but my Father who is in heaven. [18] And I say to thee: That thou art Peter; and upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. [Matthew 16:18] [Latin] [19] And I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven. And whatsoever thou shalt bind upon earth, it shall be bound also in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose upon earth, it shall be loosed also in heaven.
[20] Then he commanded his disciples, that they should tell no one that he was Jesus the Christ. "

Faith!

scripture quote from: drbo.org/index.htm

 

[FrancisB]

Forgive me, Dirt, but I don’t think he was asking about the Scriptural justification for the concept of Apostolic Succession so much as the practical application thereof.

 

[Senior_Pal]

Normally this is disgusted with the Priest, surprised its even being brought up.

 

[1ke]

how do I know that he doesn’t derive his “succession” through a 12th century English impostor who put on Bishop’s robes because he believed it was a ticket to a good life, was smart enough that he duped a town into accepting him as a valid Bishop, then ended up ordaining additional Bishops, who passed on an invalid succession all these centuries in good faith, never suspecting that they lacked actual Apostolic Succession because the impostor was never found out.

How do you know? Because imposter bishops could not just “show up” at a See. It doesn’t work that way.

Is this something that one has to accept on faith, or can I literally ask a priest to show his ordination record back to the Apostles and expect to get a believable record?

His sacramental records will include his ordination. These are maintained by the parishes and dioceses.

 

[MarkThompson]

I have a basic understanding about what Apostolic Succession means in a dictionary sense. How does one actually verify that a person who claims to have Apostolic Succession actually does? That is, if I walk into the local Catholic parish and ask the parish priest if he has apostolic succession, and then when told yes, tell him “prove it!”, what can or would he do? E.g. how do I know that he doesn’t derive his “succession” through a 12th century English impostor who put on Bishop’s robes because he believed it was a ticket to a good life, was smart enough that he duped a town into accepting him as a valid Bishop, then ended up ordaining additional Bishops, who passed on an invalid succession all these centuries in good faith, never suspecting that they lacked actual Apostolic Succession because the impostor was never found out.

Is this something that one has to accept on faith, or can I literally ask a priest to show his ordination record back to the Apostles and expect to get a believable record?

E.g. “…And then, that predecessor was ordained Bishop by Carolus, Bishop of Paris in 1343, and the original paperwork is at the Cathedral of Paris. Ask for Pierre in Records. The document index number is T-334534. Carolus was ordained Bishop by Adolphus, Bishop of Vienna, in 1302, and the original paperwork is now at the Vatican due to records collation after the Cathedral ran out of space. The document index number is S-3342-TE-2311 and is in Document Annex G…” all the way back to one of the Apostles.

In no way is this question an attack on the CC’s Apostolic Succession.

This question is intended respectfully and is a rather important matter considering how many non-Catholics have perceived the CC structure as fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy.

Records of these things are relatively good back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century; before that, they are not so good, or nonexistent. Many such records have been lost over the centuries in fires, Napoleon’s sacking of the Vatican Archives, the secularization and dissolution of abbeys and monasteries during the Reformation, etc. In many cases very the names of the bishops themselves, as we now have them, are only semi-legendary – think of bishops from fifth-century Gaul or eighth-century North Africa, for instance – so the hope of finding microfiched copies of their ordinations somewhere is pretty minimal.

One thing we do know, however, from the writings of early Church authorities is that the Church has always taken this matter very seriously. There is no reason to think that at some point in the past, for which we no longer have records, people stopped caring about the continuity of Apostolic succession for long enough for it to become a problem. To my knowledge, no historian has proposed such a thing. Moreover, the use of not just one bishop for consecration but multiple co-consecrators ensures that even if – which is not unlikely in a huge church over 20 centuries – some impostor crept in somewhere, his nullifying influence would not be perpetuated.

For Catholics, of course, we also have confidence in the promise of Jesus to Peter to build a Church against which not even Hell could prevail. That gives us a faith in the continuity of the Church and her sacraments which does not require paper documentation to be sustained.

 

[x1980x]

Normally this is disgusted with the Priest, surprised its even being brought up.

I’m not disgusted with the Priest. I’m asking if I can run an Apostolic Succession background check on him.

 

[chepner3]

The point of this question is null. Apostolic Succession from the time of Christ doesn’t matter. Each Pope is “given the keys”, not from the Pope before him (obviously since most of the time the previous Pope has passed away), but directly from God. This is the fallacy of the LDS faith. They claim the Catholic “keys” were lost. Well, they can’t be lost because each Pope gets them anew. God doesn’t lose things.

 

[bmullins]

Each Pope is “given the keys”, not from the Pope before him (obviously since most of the time the previous Pope has passed away), but directly from God.

This. By the very nature of the office of pope, even if there were an impostor, the apostolic See is renewed through the current pope, and his bishops are directly under his authority. Since we have a record of every pope, the chair of the pope is established and it is the important one. (As far as Roman Catholicism is concerned anyway.) The rest of them are made valid by the popes authority.

 

[pablope]

I’m not disgusted with the Priest. I’m asking if I can run an Apostolic Succession background check on him.

You can, if you have the time. Keep in mind the following:

Only a bishop can confer Holy Orders. So, start with the bishop or bishops who ordained him. Then who ordained the bishop…for bishops, three bishops are required…so trace the three bishops…then trace the three bishops who ordained each bishop…now you have nine…then trace the additional three bishops who ordained the nine bishops…it grows exponentially…as you can see.

But bottom line, you can trace the lineage to the Bishop of Rome…and the Bishop of Rome…you can trace the line all the way to Peter.